The Reading Public Museum, from the outside, has the aesthetics of a Russian bank. Comprised of beige stone and a vaulted glass ceiling above its vestibule, it’s located across from the Reading Hospital and in the midst of a residential neighborhood with beautiful, quaint, stone-front homes lining streets that stretch into Wyomissing.
Within its walls are a veritable treasure trove of permanent and traveling exhibits covering art, history and science.
This month and through May 3, the museum is featuring an exhibit called Spirits of the Passage: The Story of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Sponsored locally by the historic Abraham Lincoln Hotel and developed in accordance with the anniversary of Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863: The exhibit features more than one hundred artifacts from the time period (some of which have been recovered from ship wrecks).
Spirits of the Passage inhabits the museum’s entire right wing of the second floor.
Covering the complete history of the Transatlantic Slave Trade throughout the 16th to 19th centuries, it steps away from the usual slavery history seen in other museums and examines new research and findings provided by the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum of Key West, Florida. Among display cases filled with shackles, weapons and ship mechanisms eroded through years of churning salt water are information placards. They cover such subjects as the kingdoms and tribes found throughout Africa during the time period, the economic finer points of the trade of humans for material goods, the temporary legality of slave trade and the years beyond the abolishment of slavery.
There’s a lot of information to consume while making your way through the exhibit, one section educates visitors in the Yuroba Tribe and its sacred Egungun dance. A costume hangs from a beam tethered to a chain that allows it to spin. An Egungun dancer would use this costume as a way to communicate with ancestors. Spinning and twirling the dancer would attempt to create the “Breeze of Blessing”– a provocation for the ancestors to grant wishes and protection. Accompanying the hanging costume are snap-on fabric strips, available for a hands-on activity that allows guests to add to and transform the dress.
Once you’ve done your DIY charm you may feel bold enough to test out your Egungun magic. Step into the outfit, take a twirl, sashay a spin and see what happens before moving on to learn more about the time period.
One panel, illuminates Africa’s own account with slavery among their different tribes. Enslavement between societies occurred during civil wars, as payments for debt or as a sentence by a court of law. African people used prisoners of war for trade with Europeans in exchange for a “sorting”. A sorting is by definition a collection of different trading materials. A prisoner of war could be traded for such things as guns, alcohol, ceramics and textiles. These slaves, if not traded for goods, faced similar duties of those brought to America in later years, serving as laborers of agriculture or maids and butlers. The difference between these terms of service lie in the nature of the captive’s future.
Slaves of American owners were seen as a man’s property for life. Africans enslaved by other Africans, if not sold for material goods, had a potential for a better fate. For example, those forcefully taken for wives to bear children would have those offspring seen as family by their captors. Some slaves, employed by their captor’s government as soldiers, could potentially rise in rank. Others taken for manual labor could be possibly given rights against resale. Africans certainly saw purpose in disposing of their prisoners for goods, sending them to far-off lands seemed like a much more viable option than a potential uprising of their captives. Trading of POWs resulted in fractured societies, tribes lost artists, statesmen, craftsmen, women and children.
Another board explores the conflict of whether Africans and Europeans were trading for the right reasons. Europeans exported materials like glass beads for ivory. Glass beads were seen as being as valuable as gold to Africans while ivory was something locally harvested but rare to Europeans. Both parties were clearly attempting to undermine one another by swapping goods that they saw as dispensable.
Near to the trading display is a large sketch of a slave ship depicting the manner in which captives were held in the cargo decks. The drawing shows the ship’s max capacity as being somewhere in the 300’s, but other ships had the potential for 500. Each captive was packed tightly with only a few feet of space that allowed the most limited movement.
A stand-alone room leads into the next section of the exhibit. Stepping through the entrance you’ll find yourself in a cargo hold. The wooden floorboards creak beneath your shifting weight and a kaleidoscopic blue light (emulating the refraction of sunlight through ocean waters) illuminates translucent silhouettes of young African men and boys.
It’s an eerie, hair-raising representation of the close-quarters experienced by slaves in transit across the Atlantic. Turning to face a presentation of time eroded handcuffs you’ll be watched by empty eyes; the silence only quenched by the recorded sound of the gull’s cry and lapping waves colliding with the ship’s sides.
Once you’ve exited you’ll find yourself in a room that teaches about the discovery and history of sunken slave trading ships and the manner in which slaves were chosen for purchase. Video footage provided by the Mel Fisher Maritime Museum shows exploration of some of these ship wrecks by deep sea divers. Information about the abolishment of slavery and the signing of the declaration are provided in the final room. This last room also provides statistics on the amount of Africans affected by the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the ramifications on the genetics of slave descendants.
With five rooms to travel through the exhibit is filled with more information than the average fifth grader’s slavery lesson or a college student’s slept-through morning history lecture and it’s certainly worth a visit.
For more information and directions, go to www.readingpublicmuseum.org
